The Gutter Art Critic

Monday, February 20, 2017

For as long as I can remember, there has been fake news out
there, from yellow journalism to paid advertising made to appear as news.Advertising itself has in recent years gone
to absolutely crazy levels of faking real life so as to make the two virtually
indistinguishable.There is a story by
Jon Ronson of a group in England that faked a meteor impact in the country side,
a crypto advertising campaign during a soccer match involved a Barcelona player
and a spectator that threw a banana on the pitch, the player nonchalantly
picked up the banana and ate it before serving up a corner kick, the whole
event meant to advertise the campaign against racism in ‘football.’There are countless of these stories.In the 1930s yellow journalism spearheaded by
the psychopath robber baron William R. Hearst, in a vast conspiracy with
likeminded new-aristocrats like Dupont, made marijuana illegal for the next 80
years, only so they could have a monopoly in the paper and tree pulp
market.I could go on and on.

The recent glut of fake news seems to me like nothing more
than a diversion from the very real problems facing America and the world.It is also a very clever tactic to silence
the truly independent voices that do not work directly for the mainstream media
or the government.Nothing will work
better to put a stop to the drivel than a carefully crafted campaign to ban and
censor than blaming the other for attempting to do the same.Let’s be totally clear on this.Fake news has always been with us as long as
mass media has been with us.Certain
people will go to extraordinary lengths to lie and cheat others out of whatever
they have. The call to stop fake news in all its forms is really a cleaned up
way of banning and censoring independent voices and critical discourse.Fake news is not even fake news, it is ‘the’
news.Who remembers the endless prattle
of the NY Times in the lead-up to the second Iraq war that was not only
supportive of the invasion but somehow always managed to get ‘sources’ that
confirmed that WMDs actually existed in Iraq?Just because it’s NY Times does not mean that the news coming out from
them is the real news or even honest news. How is the right-wing now the ‘party of peace’
when the neo-conservatives clearly designed the plan to invade, occupy and
throw into chaos the entire Middle-East with the organization of the Project
for the New American Century?

I am highly suspicious of anything that gets everyone
talking at the same time, the viral campaigns, the memes, the trends and
fashions of the week or of the day.These make me uneasy about the world we find ourselves in.Nothing is more dangerous than mass media in
the hands of the wrong people, ask the Germans, the Russians, heck ask the
entire East European continent, ask Indonesia, the Chinese, or the people in
Rwanda. But you know what, they may tell
you ‘that was then, this is now, and things are different.’ Not so. There may
have been a time when the internet was free from manipulation, at least until the
corporate swine got their sticky fingers into it because they saw the potential
dupes that got on day in day out. They made sure that the news and the stuff
that you and I consume every day is ‘their’ stuff and not anyone else’s.When you read articles about fake news you’re
most certainly getting someone else’s version of it, the corporate version,
even if, and perhaps especially if that source appears to be an independent
source, like a blogger or YouTube celebrity. If a story spreads like wildfire, one
can bet that there is but a single source of it all.Right now, in the thick of it, we cannot tell
what that source is, but I bet that the corporate leeches that are sucking this
world dry are behind it all.Don’t buy
into the bullshit.Fake news is ‘real’
news and ‘real’ news is what someone else says it is, basically making it fake
news all along.Unless it’s stuff
happening in your backyard that you can go and see for yourself, take
everything coming out at you from the screen with a big grain of salt.The ironic self-awareness of corporations and
the upper classes only masks the impotence of the individual in mass society
and the corporate-run government wants it that way. And the fact that many of
the billionaires now look like the kid-next-door, dressed in hoodies and white
sneakers, does not subtract from the reality that some of these people are ruthless
and calculating animals. If you think you are informed, know that being
informed only means that you are towing the line for someone else.A healthy ignorance of current events will
give one a perspective on the past, present and future; neither is mutually
exclusive.

Do not mistake greatness with popularity, and don’t mistake
popularity with authority! Everyone wants you to read their own fake news, they
want you to like their Facebook posts, they want you to see their Instagram,
they want to tell you what it’s like to be them, but who are you and what are
you like? What do you think of what’s happening? The corporate scum continue to
sell the ground right from underneath us, the Miami housing market is imploding
again, student and credit card debt has crippled the economy and made the
middle of America into a wasteland, all the money’s been siphoned upward to the
uber-rich and nobody is talking about class? No, that would be too much like
communism, and we can’t have that.Let’s
let more capitalism and corporate cronyism fix the problems of capitalism and
corporate cronyism. ‘You are free to do as we tell you!’

Sunday, January 22, 2017

In light of the inauguration of Donald J Trump as president
and the million people marches out there, I’d like to stay optimistic about
developments around the globe, yet I find myself sinking back into a realization
that we are not experiencing anything new.The inauguration of both George W Bush and Barack Obama spawned protests
and counter protests, all a bit wishy washy, with no clear goals or agendas,
littered with celebrity speakers to make the crowds feel good about
themselves.I fear we have not learned
much from the past.I fear that the
protests are a simple reaction, not a means to a sustained political and social
change.

If we look at Trump’s cabinet
appointees, we see that he’s filled it with nothing but business types, some
with no political experience, much like Trump himself.But is this a revolutionary move on Trump’s
part?I would argue the opposite.Trump is just doing what is considered
hegemonic in the current globalist business ethos.He is going to run the government like a
corporation with himself the CEO in Chief.This is not new. If one looks around America, bit by bit the trend
emerges, from education to entertainment to government, schools are run by a
bloated bureaucracy of middle management administrators, retail shops, call
centers, Silicon Valley, all marching in unison to the white collar
bureaucrat.Even art museums found it
necessary in the early 21st century to lock step with the top down
winner-takes-all business model with a layer of curators and administrators
serving as intermediaries between the public and the art(ists).Trump is merely replacing one form of oppression
with another and I fear that the protesters have no alternative answers to our
predicament.Their answer seems to be to
funnel more of their own into political positions of power, supplementing
rather than replacing the very system that oppresses them.

What happened to the words of Rudy Dutschke
when he implored the radical left to go on a “long march through the institutions?”I also fear that the long march had turned
the former radicals into mushy placeholders who managed to alter their ideology
so as to remain gainfully employed in a precarious and volatile market.The vision of somebody like Dutschke is long
term, but also naïve in some respect.How can one predict what will happen to those that enter the
governmental business machinery with the intention to disrupt or change it, as
the protests suggest? How is one going to prevent the cooptation of their
faculties and subjectivity? How will these people remain committed and
accountable?

The world of business is riddled
with inequality, vicious backstabbing and corruption precisely because these
are entirely inscribed into the idea of business itself.There must be some sort of proposition made
that just as government should be separate from religion (which it is not by
any stretch of the imagination) in the classic idea of separation of church and
state, so the state must be separate from the market for it to function even on
the most fundamental level.What do we
gain by a marriage between the state and the market besides the obvious, the
relinquishing of power to the most powerful and the acquiescence by the public
to political, cultural and social hegemony and finally become beholden to the fluctuations of the market itself?

Especially fearsome is the herd mentality surrounding social media,
partly because the internet, via its supposed anonymity and virtuality,
impresses upon people the idea that actions have no consequences, the election
of Donald Trump is a case in point. If
one wants to experience freedom, one cannot hand over their personal power,
even to someone whose intentions are good and whose views on the world we
share.Trump is going to expand the
power of government, not shrink it. He is not going to replace, merely
supplement what already exists by handing over power to a like-minded
elite.It was no different under Obama
or Bush or Clinton.He will make deals,
he will write contracts, he’ll shake his fists at other politicians, all the
while firmly rooted in what he knows best, how to best profit himself.

Monday, December 19, 2016

First, I would like to point out that in no way am I
offering any sort of diagnosis of Slavoj Zizek’s speech impediment.This article/essay is a simple exercise in
perception, and yes, a Zizekian analysis.What do we get when we apply Zizek’s theories to Zizek himself?The answer may or may not be surprising,
depending on whether you are a Zizek follower or an anti-Zizek
propagandist.

In an analysis of The King’s Speech, Zizek points out that
the king’s stuttering makes the king self-conscious and in a way
embarrassed.As a divine ruler, the king
of England should be a confident authority figure perfectly capable of assuming
the role of the head of state.Delivering messages to the masses through oratory on the radio is just
one of the ways that the king’s authority is projected to the public and if the
people hear that in the voice of the king is a slight imperfection, this may be
read as a fault that might preclude the king from carrying out his divine duty,
for if god is on the side of the king, surely he would make the king a perfect
human specimen.Enter a speech
therapist.Not only is the therapist’s
role one of fixing the king’s speech impediment and boosting his confidence,
thus propping up his ego, Zizek points out that by doing this tedious,
behind-the-scenes work, he is rendering the king stupid enough so that he may
accept his position as the head of state.Zizek points this out during a scene when Geoffrey Rush playing the
speech therapist sits on the king’s throne.When the king gets agitated and tells Rush to get off his throne, the
question comes back, ‘why?’To Zizek
only the appropriate answer can come: ‘because that is my throne and I am the
king.’Rush gets off the throne, his
work seemingly coming to a successful end. He’s rendered the king able to rule
by eliminating any obstacles to any notion of self-doubt.It was self-doubt in the first place that
created the stutter which in turn made the king self-conscious and question the
authority given to the king.Only by
becoming ‘stupid enough’ can the king become a king.

What are we to make of Zizek’s own speech impediment and his
notorious shirt and nose pulling?In
light of the above argument, if we subject Zizek’s own ‘nervous tics’, as he
calls them, to the same analysis his gives to The King’s Speech, we may arrive
at a notion that Zizek is himself either a self-doubting subject uncomfortable
in his position of authority or that in some sense Zizek is himself aware that
by creating a series of nervous gestures he is actively resisting his descent
into mere grey stupidity.Can we imagine
what the world of philosophy and cultural critique would be like if Zizek spoke
fluently and eloquently, without a thick East European accent supported by a
lisp, given away to an array of jerky actions?I’m going to venture a guess and say that Zizek, not being Zizek, would
have a detrimental effect on our image of Zizek himself, his ideas aside
entirely.Should a speech therapist
enter the picture and give Zizek coaching in ‘proper’ public speaking, the resultant
confidence might actually become a detriment by creating a virtual Zizek, one
that is outwardly confident, stylish and pleasant to listen to in public, but
one that when the lights go off betrays this image by reverting to his true
self in private.

David Graeber’s analysis of nervous tics might also be
helpful here. In his own experience, Graeber, an anthropologist and former Yale
professor, identifies gestures like nose scratching as a signal of inferiority
when confronted by people in a higher position.Graeber who comes from a working-class background points out that these
nervous gestures serve an actual purpose.In grade school, nervous tics can be used as a tactic to deflect the aggressive
behavior of physically stronger alpha males, in college these same nervous
behaviors may be perceived by professors and superiors as a sign that their
authority is well met and thus not undermined by someone that may in fact be
smarter than they are. Graeber gives the example of Columbo, the working-class
detective whose intelligence is superior than the upper-class clientele he
serves. Columbo’s hand gestures signal that he accepts the apparent superiority
of his clients’ social class while undermining it with his sharp wit and
insight.Zizek’s own hand gestures and
nervous tics perhaps betray his working-class background, perhaps they do not.
Coming from the Balkans, Zizek may be subject to a cultural inferiority
complex.His small nation of Slovenia
borders Austria, Hungary and Italy, historically expansionist empires who
subjugated their Slavic neighbors and attempted to assimilate them into their
culture. I write this as a Czech whose culture was similarly absorbed by various
empires over the past several centuries.Though this is not an excuse and one cannot say with any certainty that
cultural inferiority exists, Zizek does play a big role as a Slav and a
Slovenian in a culture dominated by the French and the German schools of
continental philosophy, carving out a niche of pessimist prescience and
historical cultural analysis. If there is one thing that French and German
continental philosophy cannot be accused of, it is of an inferiority complex. The lot of the small nation is that it will
forever be bound up with the customs, fashions and trends of the large nations
that endlessly compete for dominance on the world stage, taking their smaller
and weaker neighbors for the ride. Such is the case of Czech Republic and I can
only surmise that such is the case of Slovenia in relationship even to their
Slavic neighbors Croatia. At any rate, Zizek’s speech patterns and odd
gesticulations in no way undermine what he says and in fact play into his own
character, building up the persona that is Zizek.Some may find this irritating, I find a comfort
in knowing that there is substance beyond the flat veneer of appearances.

Sunday, December 18, 2016

As disconcerting as the election of Trump was, nothing is
more telling than the fact that authenticity is coming back into the lexicon of
everyday use, courtesy of the populist right and the crypto-rightism of figures
like Alex Jones.When Hillary said she
was two different people in public and in private she might in fact have been
sincere, pointing out a simple truth.In
fact most of us act differently in front of different people. We are a
different person in front of our friends or in front of our parents.The same goes for the public and private
spheres. We not only act differently, we
speak differently without realizing that we do so. That Trump is seen as authentic because he
seems to be the same person everywhere he appears, only shows how perfectly he
plays his part in public.Are we to
assume that President Trump will be the same person as Apprentice Trump, the
boardroom Trump, and the bedroom Trump? I can only surmise that Trump’s
election is taking humanity back, not to when America was still great, but
rather back to the 1930s, when the jargon of authenticity was strongest. Philosophers like Martin Heidegger spent their
waking hours contemplating the simplicity of rural life that on the surface
seemed more authentic than city life and this gave him and the millions of his
readers the tools to proclaim that the strength of 1930s Germany lay in the
hands of the folk, who were at the time mostly poor, mostly right wing, and
mostly without a voice, the exact opposite of the cosmopolitans, artists and
socialites crowding the city centers.Hillary made a big mistake by revealing the truth about her public and
private personas.Ironically in her
moment of authenticity she revealed herself as a fraud which gave Popeye
Trumpism an unforeseen boost.Trump’s
self-made image comes from the age old adage ‘fake it until you make
it’ which is of course grounds for dismissal of all of his supposed authenticity. Trump was always helped along with other
people’s money including his father’s.The fact that he remained staunchly attached to his self-made image
despite the bankruptcies and bailouts of his many enterprises is also telling.
What is authentic about Trump is that he never backed away from the image he
built for himself.The posture of ‘fake
it until you make it’ packages up the falseness of the position one holds in a
tidy veneer of authenticity.If one lies
about being a great and wealthy man when is not, but later becomes one, what
part of his life may be called authentic?Perhaps we need to distinguish between when Trump is being authentic and
when he is being sincere.Oddly enough
the word sincere is largely missing from the lexicon and meme wars going on in
the public sphere and I don’t assume we shall see it anytime soon.

Monday, November 14, 2016

In 1950 Hannah Arendt wrote these words in the preface to
her book The Origins of Totalitarianism

“Two world wars in one generation, separated by an
uninterrupted chain of local wars and revolutions, followed by no peace treaty
for the vanquished and no respite for the victor, have ended in the
anticipation of a third World War between the two remaining world powers. This
moment of anticipation is like the calm that settles after all hopes have died.
We no longer hope for an eventual restoration of the old world order with all
its traditions, or for the reintegration of the masses of five continents who
have been thrown into a chaos produced by the violence of wars and revolutions
and the growing decay of all that has still been spared. Under the most diverse
conditions and disparate circumstances, we watch the development of the same
phenomena – homelessness on an unprecendented scale, rootlessness to an
unprecedented depth.

Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we
depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules
of common sense and self-interest – forces that look like sheer insanity, if
judged by the standards of other centuries. It is as though mankind had divided
itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that
everything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those
for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives.“

To read these words, one may have the strange feeling of a déjà
vu with the election of Donald Trump to the presidential office of the United
States of America.Though we do not have
the two World Wars our experience is neatly sandwiched between Operation Desert
Storm and the seemingly endless and ongoing oil wars in the Middle East, with a
chain of revolutions, wars, skirmishes and crises in between (Arab Spring,
Ukraine, etc), all redoubled with the largest mass movement of refugees in
recent history. Homelessness and uprootedness dominate the current discourse
with an increased drive toward the traditionalist nationalist narrative as
things take a wider turn toward the populist politics of the conservative right
precisely because certain sections of the populace want to return to the Edenic
origins from which we supposedly arrived, where gay, lesbian, trans, metro, liberal,
vegan, gluten free atheists were simple fancies and where real men and women
took part in the daily routine of tilling and farming the earth or making stuff
in factories only to come home to sleep in separate beds and where business
oligarchs made dreams possible by engineering comforts into reality and made
everyone else wealthy and prosperous at the same time.

If history is any sort of coordinate, and in America it
rarely is because for some strange reason America prides itself on its
ignorance of history and geography, it certainly should be now. Both history
and geography are inexplicably absent from the discourse of American
politics.History is treated as quaint
and useless while geography is presented as something almost un-American
because should any normal American show signs of knowledge in this area it
would almost certainly be perceived as a cowtailing to the politics and
hegemony of others. To an average American, Czech Republic remains
Czechoslovakia 24 years after this state broke into Slovakia and the Czech
Republic. It is a detachment signifying
a distance not only ideological but intellectual, but one that does not come
from simple stupidity, most Americans are actually not complete idiots, it
seems to come from a type of strength of self-identity that governs the
dealings of most US politicians with other nations, it is an arrogant hubris
that is normal in the US and completely illogical, inexplicable and dangerous
to everyone else.Interestingly enough,
in Czech Republic the leading politicians have embraced Trump on the simple
premise that he, unlike other presidents before him, actually knows where Czech
Republic is, given that he seems to hunt for his love interests in the waters
of Eastern Europe.

To be certain I have treated the American political campaign
with a completely identical distance, observing most of the events leading up
to the election from the high tower of detachment. The campaigns of both
Clinton and Trump seemed unreal most of the time and like jokes during others,
Clinton the supposedly decent and calculating candidate whose first order of
business was to save face at all costs, Trump the crazy nationalist press whore
to whom all sorts of attention, positive or negative, is equally valuable.Trump does not have a drug of choice and does
not discriminate between what type of fix his he gets, he accepts them all
sight unseen.During all of this, both
Clinton and Trump have been called fascist, but now that we know that Trump is
going to be the next president, we should analyze whether or how this label
applies.To be sure and in light of the
information that we have on both, the danger posed by each candidate as
president can be summed up this way, Trump is dangerous potentially and Clinton
actually, Clinton is after all tied to the Military Industrial Complex, while
Trump’s only famous political stunt was as a Birther.

Thou Sayeth Fascist
and Thou Shalt Receive

Of course the problem is that fascist, if we want to be
completely specific, is a term applied to the ideology of the Italian system of
government under Benito Mussolini, yet like Nazi, the term has been loosely
thrown at anyone whose political stance is different from one’s own in order to
discredit them.For many years the term
corporatist was used pejoratively in an attempt to replace the term fascist but
with limited success.Corporatist just
does not sound dirty enough.But where
the term Nazi fails because it’s been properly profaned by intellectuals and
idiots alike, the word fascist remains an acceptable term for everyday use.In its simplest iteration the words fascist
and corporatist signify an absolute interconnectedness between the worlds of
business (banks, corporations, technologies, etc) and government, making them
indistinguishable from one another, with a third external component in the
church.What Fascism also signifies is a
movement toward a totality in which all three worlds that make up the day to
day happenings in which most of us move, with little chance of escape or wiggle
room for alternatives.The idea is that
by combining these three world into a seamless whole, preferably under a single
party rule, the entire apparatus would move smoothly, society would be totally
administered, business able to police itself, ideology left to the church and government’s
sole purpose would be to protect both worlds from the people through the rule
of law, written specifically for the worlds of business and the church by the
government. Trump’s Mussolini-like act behind the podium seems to suggest that
the movement is certainly one toward a corporate agenda, though he will
certainly be hard pressed to make himself into an absolute ruler in a
government that is still operational under certain checks and balances.But the success of Trump’s campaign certainly
deserves attention.

I for one was certain that Clinton was going to win the
election and that there will be little surprise on the morning of November the
9th.I am interested in
seeing the day after, when the so called revolution realizes that it is now the
establishment.Trump’s political
campaign was an iteration of Bush’s campaign, as both presented themselves as
anti-establishment outsiders, when both were neither.Both were able to mobilize sections of
American society from which neither originated but decided to speak to and in
their stead.When looking at the states
that Trump was able to carry it is apparent that he made use of those who on
the whole seemed voiceless.Arendt
points out that Hitler’s rise to power in Germany wasn’t simply a carefully
organized conspiracy of a select few powerful men, he in fact depended on his
own popularity with the people. He was
able to mobilize the ‘volk’ because he was the only one that paid any attention
to them. It was they who stood with him
because no other politician did. Hitler focused his attention on those that
previously had no political experience or power, the seemingly disenfranchised
multitude that was everywhere yet apparently entirely voiceless and forgotten.The Communists in Russia did as Hitler did,
with similar results.

“It was characteristic of the rise of the Nazi movement in
Germany and of the Communist movements in Europe after 1930 that they recruited
their members from this mass of apparently indifferent people whom all other
parties had given up as too apathetic or too stupid for their attention. The
result was that the majority of their membership consisted of people never
before had appeared on the political scene. This permitted the introduction of
entirely new methods into political propaganda and indifference to the arguments
of political opponents; these movements not only placed themselves outside and
against the party system as a whole, they found a membership that had never
been reached, never been ‘spoiled’ by the party system.”

Trump was apparently able to give a voice to a section of
the population in the predominantly democratic but depressed rust belt states
in the north like Michigan. The polls
showed overwhelming numbers in support of Clinton, but did anyone bother to leave
the cities or the swing states and ask the people there? Everyone was so sure of a Clinton victory that
even the Republicans for a while did not believe that Trump actually won. Where
Clinton’s surplus political power came from the gender gap, Trump focused his
on class, precisely where Hitler was so successful. Despite the increasing
race, gender, and culture wars being waged in the US, Trump was able to
capitalize on the thing that trumps (pardon the pun) them both. If Clinton
believes, like her husband, that ‘it’s the economy stupid,’ then Trump is
betting on class relations. To be sure, the ‘volk’ that voted Trump into office
were indeed mostly white and mostly rural, but not entirely, there were black,
white, Latino, upper, lower, middle class voters that turned out, more Latino
and black voters came out to vote for Trump than they did for Romney, yet they
all seemed to have voted in order to gain a voice and not with their wallets
the way they did with Bush.Ironically
they cast a vote for someone who along with Clinton is least likely to actually
give them the time of day, for in order to cast a vote for someone that truly
spoke to and for them would have been to vote for no one, no such choice ever
existed. Trump’s nostalgically utopian slogan spelled out the tragic reality of
America today, since America was great only in its specific iterations when in
service to a specific race and class of its citizenry. Again, no such greatness
ever existed when projected onto a global scale, if it did, it existed merely
as a mediated image, an iteration of Trumpism dressed in 1980s fashion and hair
styles dipped in gallons of hair spray. A second irony dwells in the sad prediction
that Trump may indeed make the US ‘great’ again by ‘fixing’ the economy, an
iteration of Hitler’s economic miracle, propped up and supported by American
and European banks and wealthiest families.Trump is a business man, the nostalgic superhero of the American
middle-class, sweeping in from the chaos of the streets like Batman, waging war
with allegorical enemies, the entire source of his wealth owed to his father
and eventually propped up by banks who bailed him out when times were
lean.Trump is filthy rich, but not
necessarily from his real estate dealings, he owns very little, but rather from
the selling of his name and his act, Trump is a master at branding and
entertainment. Trump’s ridiculous
pronouncements take on an air of foreboding when seen through the historicist
lens of Arendt.

“For the propaganda of totalitarian movements which precede
and accompany totalitarian regimes is invariably as frank as it is mendacious,
and would-be totalitarian rulers usually start their careers by boasting of
their past crimes and carefully outlining their future ones.”

Thou Shalt Laugh at
Your Neighbor’s Misfortune

Make no mistake, Trump is a genius manipulator, but he is no
strategist.He shoots from the hip
rather than carefully organizes his every thought, he has others do that for
him, yet all the top totalitarian leaders employed coaches, aides and
consultants, to teach them proper form in public, from Hitler, to Kim Jong Un.
To be sure, I draw on the similarities between the ideology put forward by
Trump and the existing fascist ideology of the 20th century modernist
era knowing full well that there is a world of difference between the two.
Trump is not Hitler, and Trumpism isn’t fascism.I draw on Arendt’s work in order to highlight
knowledge already apparent in hindsight of the actions of fascists and the
flirtation with the words and images of said fascism by Donald Trump. It was
already in the early 1920s when social commentators noticed something wrong in
the population of Europe.Where from came
the need and desire for a strong leader and one party rule? The danger of the
Reds was purely virtual as far as Europe outside of Soviet Russia was concerned.
Yellow Journalism was at its height and industrialist tycoon-run newspapers,
opposed to the wave of liberalism and hedonism sweeping Europe and America,
countered with remorseless trumped up attacks, making all sort of things
illegal from marijuana to Communism. The liberals and the left caved and the
nationalist right ushered in an unprecedented era of human suffering and
destruction.

Today’s left is continuing its struggle with itself. It lost
its way during the 1960s and was not able to regain its footing, deferring to a
set of outmoded prescriptions without so much as a modicum of self-reflexivity,
instead blaming the outcomes of elections on the idiocy of the electorate.The left should have been able to prop up
Sanders toward the presidency, instead it decided to moan and complain about
the corrupt Clinton campaign that swept him off his perch during the primary.In 2011 it seemed that the left was
reemerging from the swamps of history with the Occupy Movement, but in 2016
this wet dream finally turned into a sobering reality as the redeeming quality
of grassroots movements oriented toward populist ideas morphed into sentiments
of xenophobic nationalism. The irony is,
of course, that the left had by this time completely evacuated its discourse of
critical thinking and above all of actual cold hard facts, let me rephrase
that, the left had in fact directed critical thinking toward a defense of its
position instead of putting forth a clear outline of its ideas, ideals and
ideology, allowing for the manipulation of data, facts and stats by the
opposition to go unchecked. The left had instead focused its gaze on the nebulous
idea of multiculturalism and a type of reverse racism, clothed as white
guilt.It took less than ten years,
roughly corresponding with the rise of the smart phone and the distribution of
Google and the iPhone to every home and hamlet in a quasi-socialist manner, for
the typical Joe and Jane to be on the one hand mortally offended by any
deviation in the normalized speech and dress and on the other to be scared witless
for not knowing whether they themselves have deviated in some way from the
clearly outlined coordinates of acceptable mannerisms. Political correctness
does have a place, mostly in an academic setting where a set of rules for
conduct level the playing field and establish a standard of correctness. One
has to wonder how and why was political correctness used as a straightjacket of
western populations?

It is interesting to see when a feminist like Camille Paglia
or black conservative Larry Elder hack away the myths of modern feminism and white
privilege respectively, using simple numbers and facts, the left doesn’t know
how to react and instead resorts to a wholesale ad hominem attack, hence the
attacks on Donald Trump and a kind of strangely revolting acceptance of Clinton
despite the overwhelming facts pointing to her as simply a George W. Bush in drag.To be sure, the disinterested approach of
cold hard facts and sober realism of the right is just as alienating and empty
as the passionate appeal to humanity from the left.What we witnessed during the last election
cycle and especially in the last few hours before the results were actually
called was a tragedy turned into a comedy. The seemingly endless tears
streaming from the faces of disillusioned voters, the ridiculous vague open
letters compelling readers toward unity and tolerance during hard times, the
smugness of the wannabe industrialist victor, the awkward fall of the politico-military
puppet backed by banks and the media were sweet music to the ears of all those
who already gave the finger during the DNC.Both parties have left most of the people neck deep in the dust of the
techno-industrial wasteland and now they are slowly figuring out how to pull
the plug on the rest. To have a hearty laugh at the expense of liberal apparatchiks
or the conservative proletariat, both deeply troubling and paradoxical
positions, is the only form of therapy that is and will be left when the doors
of corporate America finally shuts its doors to the outside world. In some
strange schadefreude way I am looking forward to the presidency of Donald
Trump, the reality star buffoon with an orange toupee.But did we not see this before?Who still recalls the presidency of George W.
Bush and his famous one liners, the stupefying lunacy of Sarah Palin, the
muscle-flexing pronouncements of B-movie western cowboy Ronald Reagan? Donald
Trump did actually achieve a first with his election, he is the first president
we can watch on YouTube get roasted by SnoopDog. The Republicans have endless
hours of horrifying entertainment in the National Archives and it will be a
strange pleasure to witness the history of an American political reality show
taking center stage from the Oval Office.The question is, who will be the celebrity judge when we will first see
Trump give Berlusconi a run for his money in pomposity, and how long will it
take before somebody yells out ‘you’re fired’ at a presidential press
conference?

Saturday, August 13, 2016

First off, let me write that this is not a how to guide
about how to become a professional artist.There are hundreds, if not thousands of those out there, most of them geared
toward commodifying the artist personality and by extension the artwork.I’m not sure if following those guides actually
help or not, just like I’m not sure whether my two years in an MFA program
actually prepared me for a life of a professional artist.What I can say is that after the MFA
professionalism is something that is not given over by a degree or title but
acquired, and even if one doesn’t sell the work they make, does that make them
a lesser artist?I suppose that to be a
professional in western culture means to make money off of what one does, but
does that immediately negate all the artists that slave away in and out of
their studios daily who do not have gallery representation or sell their work,
do not appear in flashy magazines, do not get to exhibit in the art fairs and
biennials around the world, do not have long write ups on art blogs and are
generally ignored?

For me to believe that I am a professional artist I have to
have certain criteria met.I have to be
able to make work, which means that I have to have a space to do it, preferably
a studio.I have to be able to
communicate with the people I know like and enjoy my work and to get it out to
those that may one day like and enjoy my work.Easy enough I suppose, I have a studio and a computer.But sending off random emails to curators and
galleries is like knocking on a stranger’s door, first you don’t know if anyone
is home and second what do you say if they open up?The elevator speech? The ultimate in
self-presentation and commodification?Give me a run-down of what you do and what you are about in 30 seconds.
Go! Fair enough, even I understand the merits of this type of presentation.

The road to being a professional artist is a long and
arduous one.But the question is what is
wrong with just calling oneself an artist and leaving the word professional out
of it?Some people get there by walking
over others, by screaming the loudest, by kissing enough ass along the
way.It would be naïve to think that
those people do not exist.Those artists
are not bothered by ethics or common decency, or the dignity of those they callously
throw under the bus just so they can get a short step ahead.But for myself I have to be somewhat naïve to
think that those artists will one day end up in the trash heap of history, that
their behavior will get them excommunicated, because the reality is that the
artworld is filled with people of the most terrible sort, many of whom are at
the top of the pile, but just as many are the rank and file, waiting to fill
the few spots that might one day become available at the top.

My naiveté is that I believe that the alternative is also
possible, that the alternative to the commercial artworld is not only the academic
profession, where you have to watch what you say and how you say it. My advice,
if one can call it that, is to read whatever you can and listen to whoever you
can about being an artist and as soon as you do that, forget everything you
read and heard, because those people don’t know shit.Only you know how to make your work and what’s
best for you.Professionalism destroys
art.An artist has to be first and
foremost, free.